Tag Archives: conservation
Exploring Florida’s Dry Prairie
This post was contributed to Eco-Compass by Reed Noss, Provost’s Distinguished Research Professor for the Department of Biology at University of Central Florida and author/editor of six Island Press books. Noss was a guest trekker with John Davis during TrekEast.
This past weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit with my old friend John Davis—who is engaged in TrekEast—to show him one of my favorite places, Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park in south-central Florida. We met up with the park biologist, Paul Miller, and took a tour of the park for a day and a half.
Kissimmee Prairie contains the largest and most pristine expanse of an endangered ecosystem—the Florida dry prairie. This is an incredible place, with vast expanses of dry prairie, a natural community that contains the highest plant species richness of all treeless grasslands in North America, and one of the highest in the world. Other organisms, such as butterflies, are also extremely diverse here. The dry prairie once covered between one and two million acres, but has been reduced by some 90 percent, mostly by conversion to improved pastures.
The signature species of the dry prairie is the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, a federally Endangered subspecies that is completely restricted to this community and is probably the most imperiled bird in Florida, and one of the most imperiled on the continent. At the most, only a few hundred individuals remain and the population has been declining for reasons that are still unclear.
Federal and state agencies are not doing nearly enough to promote recovery of this species. I guess it’s hard for most people to get excited about a sparrow, but those of us who know it love this bird. It appears to be the most fire-dependent vertebrate in North America. After only three years without fire, its habitat becomes unsuitable and it cannot breed successfully.
The dry prairie is indeed dry this time of year, but is regularly inundated by a few inches of water in the summer wet season. We also visited some wetter habitats with John, including Gum Slough, which is the last known nesting location of the extinct Carolina Parakeet. The last confirmed nest was in 1927. Standing in the dwarf black gum–pop ash old-growth forest along the slough, one can imagine what is used to be like with flocks of Carolina Parakeets. Their ghosts were all around us.
The flat, seemingly monotonous Florida dry prairie landscape may not match the mountain splendor of some other regions of North America, but it has a charm of its own. There is nothing like it anywhere on earth and for the aware naturalist—no place is more spectacular.
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Thank a National Forest Roadless Area
The next time you turn on the tap, chances are the water came from a local National Forest. National Forests provide drinking water for about 60 million Americans nationwide and about 15 percent of the nation’s freshwater runoff. This clean water is worth an estimated net value of $27 billion annually. And the cleanest of this water comes from watersheds free of roads and development.
Known as Inventoried Roadless Areas, these pristine areas are each larger than 5,000 acres and collectively make up about one-third of the National Forest land base (58.5 million of the 193 million areas). They provide refuge for countless fish and wildlife, many of which are threatened with extinction, contain old-growth forests and many other native plant communities, and they purify drinking water among other benefits. In fact, over 900 roadless watersheds nationwide are source areas for facilities that treat and distribute drinking water to the public. Cities like Denver in Colorado, Portland, Bend, and Ashland in Oregon, obtain at least some of their drinking water from surrounding roadless watersheds.
When roads are built into watershed areas, water quality, and fish and wildlife habitat is harmed. This is because the road prism, an area of ground containing the road surface, cut and fill slope, acts as a conduit for transporting sediments to nearby creeks. Too much sediment in streams pollutes drinking water and chokes salmon spawning beds.
The ensuing water quality damage also comes with economic costs from collapsing road beds, and dredging of reservoirs to increase capacity and channels to enable navigation. For instance, Salem, Oregon spent approximately $100 million on new treatment facilities after logging in upper watersheds created conditions leading to mass sedimentation in its watershed following storms in 1996. The city of Seattle deferred a $150 million filtration plant expenditure through an intensive watershed rehabilitation program that will decommission 300 miles of road over a ten-year period, fix road erosion problems, and limit access and high-risk sedimentation/fire activities within their watersheds.
The bulk of the nation’s roadless areas are west of the Rockies, and many are in the rainforest regions of Alaska. Take for instance, the Chugach National Forest—the nation’s second largest national forest—with nearly 5.6 million acres encompassing the Kenai Peninsula, Prince William Sound, and Copper River Delta. This National Forest is managed primarily for recreation and fish and wildlife habitat, including the only example of boreal rainforests in the United States. Nearly all of the Chugach is undeveloped and roadless. Its clean water acts as a wellspring for iconic salmon, the base of the food chain for hundreds of species, including grizzly bears and bald eagles.
Further south, on the nation’s largest National Forest—the Tongass—there are nearly 5,000 miles of roads crisscrossing this rainforest, particularly on Prince of Wales Island. The island has many of the most productive old-growth rainforests on the Tongass and, correspondingly, the highest road density in the Tongass National Forest. Here road building and logging has created a patchwork of alternating clearcut and roadless old-growth rainforest areas. Continued logging could eventually lead to the situation in the Pacific Northwest where water quality has been degraded by roads and salmon populations are circling the drain.
In the coming months, several court and administrative decisions could affect the Roadless Conservation Rule that provides protections for National Forest roadless areas. Some decisions already have been made that alter this landmark conservation rule. For instance, in Idaho a federal judge recently granted a state-filed exemption to the rule that provides increased protections for some areas while opening others up to mining and other developments.
The state of Colorado also submitted a petition to the Obama administration to open up millions of acres in federal roadless areas for ski area expansions, coal mining, oil and gas leasing, logging, and other developments. Conflicting court rulings in the lower courts over interpretation of the Roadless Conservation Rule will soon be decided in a case pending in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. In the meantime, millions of Americans drink clean water from their faucets never realizing where their water comes from or how it is affected by logging and road building. When it comes to clean water, here’s to roadless areas.
About Dominick A. DellaSala
Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Hunting and the Land Ethic
I spent a dozen purple dusks and gilded dawns last December hunkered down in the hoarfrost in coulees, hiding in the rabbitbrush and sage during a late-season Colorado elk hunt. In an area with too many elk and not enough wolves, hunting cow elk provides a powerful conservation tool, because of its effectiveness in thinning herds.
I had convened a science hunt on the High Lonesome Ranch in north-central Colorado. My hunting companions included Michael Soulé, who founded the science of conservation biology, and James Estes, a prominent marine ecologist who studies how predation by sea otters shapes ocean ecosystems. They were veteran hunters, while I was new to hunting. And so these men, who had long mentored me in my science, also mentored me in my first hunt.
As a scientist I study how predation affects whole ecosystems, specifically how wolf predation affects their primary prey elk and how this relationship can influence food webs. Remove an apex predator, such as the wolf, and elk grow more abundant and bold, damaging their habitat by unsustainably consuming vegetation. Lacking apex predators, ecosystems can support fewer species, because the plants that create habitat for these species have been over browsed.
Scientists, such as Aldo Leopold, recognized that apex predators benefit ecosystems in myriad ways by increasing the flow of energy. Yet, given human needs for land use and development, it isn’t possible to have wolves and other apex predators in as many places as they roamed several hundred years ago. In A Sand County Almanac Leopold articulated his land ethic philosophy. He wrote:
“A thing is right if it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
In the 1940s, Leopold was among the first to suggest that hunting by humans, if done properly, can help emulate apex predation. This concept was highly controversial. A lifelong hunter, he had the temerity to suggest harvesting as the most effective way to control the deer population. His suggestion was poorly received by the public. Leopold died long before his ideas about hunting and the land ethic were accepted.
Paradoxically, predation and the primal act of hunting are intrinsic elements of who we are as humans. These relationships are elucidated across the ages in Paleolithic petroglyphs of spear-wielding humans and saber-toothed tigers killing bison. As omnivores, our diet has historically consisted of wild foods harvested from the land, which includes the flesh of other animals. Today, as we strive to live more lightly on the earth, some of us are turning to hunting as both a way to create healthier ecosystems and nourish ourselves with natural, wholesome food.
And so, I got my elk after six days of hard hunting. Afterward, I was filled with gratitude for the gift of this elk. She will feed my family and friends for one year. And her meat tastes of sagebrush and snowy mountains and clear streams and deep wildness—the sort of wildness Aldo Leopold wrote about in his land ethic essay.
About Cristina Eisenberg
Cristina Eisenberg is a conservation biologist at Oregon State University, College of Forestry, and Boone and Crockett Fellow who studies how wolves affect forest ecosystems throughout the West.
International Year of Forests brings forest conservation to main stage
Recognizing that forests can contribute to sustainable development, poverty eradication and internationally agreed upon development goals, the United Nations declared this year—”International Year of Forests.” The United Nations is set to meet in New York City later this month to announce why forests matter.
And meet they should, as forests face off against the double whammy of humanity’s insatiable demand for wood products coupled with climate disruptions that threaten to undermine the life-giving properties and biodiversity that forests provide . Take, for instance, the recent Global Forest Resource Assessment published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. While deforestation is showing signs of easing, it remains alarming high in South America, Oceania, and Africa as well as among the world’s primary forests that have declined by some 40 million hectares since 2000.
These estimates are on the conservative side as forests are liberally defined (less than 10 percent cover) and plantations count in national forest inventories even though they are not considered “forests” by conservationists. As an example, the recent United States forest assessment to the FAO failed to report on conversion of old-growth forests to tree farms, focusing narrowly on forest cover regardless of forest quality.
Nonetheless, the International Year of Forests and other global policy initiatives provide entry points for putting forests on a big stage. And last December, the UN set specific goals for the so called REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) but progress continues to stall over lack of legally binding accords. Importantly, deforestation abatement discussions have been limited to developing countries that would receive payments from developed ones to maintain their vast carbon stores by keeping forests upright. While a positive step, nonetheless, developed countries need to lead by example in limiting their own deforestation and forest degradation.
With the UN kick starting a discussion on forests, perhaps this is a turning point for the world’s primary forests. Primary forests cleanse the air we breathe, purify drinking water supplies, and store an estimated 289 gigatonnes of carbon globally in their biomass alone. In the tropics, they account for over half of all the terrestrial biodiversity on earth. And temperate rainforests, with their massive long-lived trees, dense foliage, and productive soils are among the world’s champions in storing carbon long term. When primary forests are cut down, much of these benefits are lost and carbon is released to the atmosphere where it contributes to greenhouse gas pollution.
As the UN deliberates over the fate of forests, at a minimum the global community needs to push for greatly expanded forest protections for all the world’s forests while promoting sustainable management on a big scale. To do otherwise is just talk.
About Dominick A. DellaSala
Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Getting Down to Business when Business is Bad
This past week the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale hosted the 3rd annual Conservation Finance Camp. This camp consisted of 19 practitioners working on preserving natural resources through land conservation and 16 instructors brought together to determine the best ways to finance conservation.
For the first time, the curriculum focused on conservation finance in a recession and capital-constrained world. Story Clark and Brad Gentry of Yale designed the new direction for the camp to create new ideas that are possible now instead of at some distant point in the future. The theme repeated over and over is what can we do now—what are the opportunities that the recession allows for at this moment? Instead of wallowing in difficult financial times, these practitioners are using the recession to reorganize strategies for their land acquisition, evaluate the effectiveness of their communications campaigns, reach out to fallen behind or small donors, and investigate new revenue streams, such as CSA’s and green cemeteries.
Everyone acknowledged that donations drop for the environment during constrained financial times…but this group was optimistic and focused on making deals. Jeffry Marshall of Heritage Conservancy showed that opportunities are still available through conservation development. Peter Stein of Lyme Timber Company showed that land can be preserved sustainably with the assistance of working forest easements. The attendees representing 18 different organizations from Mt. Desert, Maine to Lima, Perú spent the week learning about these strategies and more while applying them to specific land conservation finance problems chosen by the group.
Donations might be down, lending might be off, and debt might be up, but people working in land acquisition are not in despair. They are focusing on efficiency and creating new strategies to ameliorate their work. Let’s hope others experiencing the same economic frustrations are thinking as positively!
–Kate Graves, Program Director
Anthony D. Barnosky: Now for Some Good News
My extended family tells me they’re getting a little depressed about hearing all the bad things that might happen from global warming. So I guess it’s time to point out that maybe it’s not as bleak as it seems. Here’s the good news.
We live in a world that, despite the unwitting impacts of humanity, is still in pretty good shape. If you define wilderness as places that have fewer than five people per square km, with at least 70% of the natural vegetation intact, in patches of at least 10,000 square km, you are talking about 46% of Earth’s land surface. That’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good, and offers reason for hope. Humanity also clearly values unspoiled places as emotional touchstones, as evidenced by some 12% of Earth’s land being designated as national parks, reserves, or similarly legislated areas where some aspect of nature is protected.
At least some of those areas are still ecologically intact to the extent that they are working very much as they were long before modern society got its hands on them. The Yosemite area still has pretty much the full complement of mammal species it had in John Muir’s time. Yellowstone still has nearly all the mammals that have inhabited the park for at least three thousand years. In Africa, there are lots of charismatic megafauna left, and in fact overall community structure in many nature reserves there is not too different than it has been for tens of thousands of years.
Bottom line: there’s still an awful lot worth saving out there. We may be looking at the brink, but we’re not over it yet. So far we’ve been reasonable, if far from perfect, stewards of nature.
We don’t want to blow it now, and we could in an instant. That’s why the danger signs we’re seeing in Earth’s special places are particularly noteworthy—shifts of Yosemite’s species to higher ground as climate heats up, decline in Yellowstone’s amphibian species as drought hits the park year after year, and dwindling populations of large animals in South African parks as the dry season gets too long. These are early warning signs of heatstroke for nature, but it doesn’t have to be fatal.
Which brings us to the second bit of good news—we can do something to prevent the worst consequences of global warming, including consequences for nature. A critical piece of the solution is to take action to slow Earth’s heat-up—and that means at the personal level, the corporate level, and at the national and international levels. For nature, we will also have to implement new conservation strategies to account for some amount of global warming that is inevitable.
Lest you think it’s un-doable, remember two things.
- Individual actions really are important. Just for example, changing light bulbs to CFLs. Multiply out the lightbulbs changed by hundreds of millions of households and businesses, and estimates of how much CO2 just that one action would keep out of the atmosphere range from 1.6 gigatons over 25 years, to saving as much as 2.4 gigatons over 10 years. To put that in perspective, around 3 gigatons is about what seems likely be added over the next 10 years if business goes on as usual.
- Never underestimate what people can do when they put their minds to it.
And therein lies perhaps the best news yet. Human ingenuity and potential are enormous. If we just put our minds to a common task.
About Anthony Barnosky
Since 1990, Anthony Barnosky has been on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently holds the posts of Professor of Integrative Biology, Curator of Fossil Mammals in the Museum of Paleontology, and Research Paleoecologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
How the California Fish and Game Turned Community Opinion Around
I never thought they could dig themselves out of the situation. But they did–and the way they did it is a great lesson for all conservationists who work with people.
California’s Eastern Sierra was a pleasant surprise for me. Previously I had assumed California was a land of gigantic freeways, continuous urban sprawl, and crowded theme parks–but most of the state wasn’t. When I drove from Olympia, Washington to take my new job as a professor at the USGS Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in Tucson, Arizona, I avoided the freeways in favor of two-lane highways that weaved through miles of desert, pines, and shrub step dotted with fragrant grey sage. Interspersed occasionally through this vast countryside were small towns, and when I saw the sign for Portola, I knew I had hit the jackpot. We had talked about this town so much in my fisheries management classes, and I was excited to see the real thing.
This was 2000, and things did not look good for the California Fish and Game Department (CFG) in Portola County. Members of the community had vehemently protested their use of rotenone, a fish poison, to kill illegally introduced northern pike in Lake Davis in 1997. Why was removing the northern pike so important? Northern pike are voracious predators, not native to California. It was feared that the fish would reproduce and spread to other areas in the state, like so many other non-native species had done before. They might endanger imperiled salmon runs and other fish and wildlife downstream. CFG staff thought rotenone was the answer. Made from the roots of a specific species of tree called the derris, It had been used for thousands of years to stun and kill fish for food. The plan was to kill the fish in the lake and prevent their spread across the wider area.
This decision was not popular with many members of the local community, chiefly because the commonly-used rotenone formulation contained a small amount of an agent linked to cancer. Even though the amount of the cancer-causing agent to be used to disperse the rotenone was supposedly 1/10 that allowed in drinking water by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Community members marched on the state capitol, threatened CFG biologists with arrest, chained themselves to buoys in the lake prior to treatment of the lake, and pelted CFG members with Halloween candy during the treatment. Treatment of the lake went forward, under armed guard. When chemical residues of the rotenenone treatment persisted in the lake longer than predicted, CFG was sued and settled on a payout of $9.1 million to the community.
When I visited in 2000, I asked about the treatment in a local book store and library, obtaining articles and documents I could use in my fisheries management classes in Arizona. Did I ever get an earful from local residents! However, when another rotenone treatment was required in 2007 to kill northern pike that reappeared, there was widespread community support, even from some of those officials who had chained themselves to buoys during the 1997 treatment. Why did public opinion change so drastically?
California Fish and Game learned from past mistakes. Within two years of the 1997 roteneone treatment, northern pike were again seen in the lake. Fish and Game staff moved to an office in town to be closer to the constituents. They held dozens of meetings, working diligently to educate the public and include them in their decision making. Fish and Game discussed options at these meetings, listened to public input, and tried to address their concerns. Doing nothing about the newly-found pike was considered, but quickly dismissed—town businesses were impacted severely by their presence, which curtailed the lucrative trout fishery. In addition, there was fear that northern pike could escape downstream to areas supporting imperiled fish and wildlife susceptible to northern pike predation. Other methods besides rotenone, including electroshock, nets and explosives, were first tried but were unsuccessful in ridding the lake of northern pike. Although 65,000 northern pike were removed, many still remained in the lake. By this time, the public realized another rotenone treatment might be one of the few solutions left. However, many things were done this time to make a rotenone treatment more palatable. Previously, Lake Davis supplied drinking water to the community. California Fish and Game had drilled water wells so that ground water could supply Portola with water. Residents were concerned with the synergists used with the liquid rotenone in 1997. For the 2007 treatment, a different, less-controversial formulation of rotenone was used. The Plumas County Public Health Agency and the state Department of Health Services determined that the treatment plan would not adversely affect the public. The U.S. Forest Service who owned the land surrounding the lake was asked to support the treatment and close the area during treatment.
Bill Powers, now a county supervisor and one of the local officials that previously chained himself to a buoy stated “In ’97 there were secrets; there were unknowns. The more the local government people like myself asked questions, the more we were stonewalled. This time, every question we asked has been answered.” Furthermore, Powers stated “I’ve seen the evidence now that there are no public safety issues and that it is a necessary evil. I wish we didn’t have to do it, but we do. In 1997, it all came down to no communication.”
For the second treatment, the CFG implemented a classic example of how to create positive community change. Answer questions, avoid arrogance, involve the community in decisions, listen. The result was a treatment of Lake Davis with community support, not condemnation. Those of us in the conservation can learn much from the difficulties – then later success – of the California Fish and Game.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Scott A. Bonar is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona and Unit Leader of the USGS Arizona Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. He has over 25 years experience conducting award-winning natural resources research for federal and state agencies and private industry. In 2007, Island Press published his book The Conservation Professional’s Guide to Working With People, which you can read about at http://workingwithpeoplebook.com.
About Scott A. Bonar
Scott A. Bonar is Associate Professor of Wildlife & Fisheries Sciences with USGS and Unit Leader, Arizona Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. Bonar focuses on fisheries management, native-nonnative aquatic species interactions and management, desert fish conservation and management, standardized fish sampling, communication in conservation, general fisheries management, management and ecology of introduced species, predator-prey interactions in aquatic systems, and politics and communication in natural resources.
Gary Nabhan: Potato Diversity and Traditional Knowledge
As mentioned in last week’s blog post, in Peru’s Parque de la Papa-the Potato Park-, the Quechuan farmers maintain some 1200 varieties of potatoes named in their own language. Farmers are particularly attentive to the effects of climate change on the micro-habitats where each potato variety can be planted. Quechuan Ricardo Paco Chipa says his father constantly reminds him that the elevation distributions of potatoes today are far different than those that were common when he first farmed a half century ago. Certain varieties cannot grow as low as they once did, because of the heat they would suffer in those places today. At least four cold-tolerant varieties once planted at the highest levels have recently become rare, for lack of any habitats today that are free from the heat during their six month-long growing season. One black and white variety which Ricardo called luqui was once commonly used for making chuno, the freeze-dried potatoes that can be rehydrated for soups and purees:
“There is less snow each year, less water, and hotter seasons. Now we must plant each variety higher and higher from year to year. The varieties adapted to the very coldest country below the peaks now have hardly any place to grow.”
And yet, these Quechuan farmers are not passive victims of climate change; they are dynamically responding to such changes by employing their crop diversity and their traditional knowledge to meet such challenges. Ricardo was clear that this was among their primary motivations for engaging in the collective mission of the Potato Park:
“We are not only bringing back a diversity of potato varieties to our fields, but the traditional knowledge about how and where to grow them-and prepare them-as well.”
This was not always the case. In the 1960s, the Peruvian government and international agricultural agencies lured Ricardo’s forefathers into adopting new agricultural practices and concentrating on a few “improved” potato varieties. But these imported techniques, technologies and hybrids did not necessarily suit the conditions found in highlands surrounding Cusco. One Quechuan farmer-Justicio Ucra-smirked as he explained what happened:
“We found that the improved varieties not only did poorly in the marketplace, but they were bad for the soil and bad for your health.”
Gradually, the farmers returned to the time-tried varieties that they had not already abandoned; with the repatriation of other varieties collected by CIP’s plant explorers in the 1970s, and others gifted to them by farmers in other parts of Peru, they now collectively cultivate over a thousand varieties each year. This not only offers them a modicum of food security from year to year; it is also allowing the farmers to move toward the goal of true food sovereignty:
“We have to go beyond mere food security to food sovereignty and sustainability because that is the only way we can have a good relationship with Pachamama, a good relationship with the land…”
In the meantime, the farmers wives—who also sow, harvest and ceremonially bless the potatoes—are busy experimenting with how to better use their great diversity of potatoes. They’ve formed “the Gastronomic Work Group” (Maruja) with other women from the six communities to document traditional recipes and innovate around them:
“What we do is not unlike the kind of innovation with food that our grandmothers did. We combine particular potato varieties with various medicinal plants and other herbs from the wild used in making sauces. We evaluate them on whether they are both tasty and healthy.”
In the park’s co-op restaurant called Papamanka, the food they offered us met both of those criteria. It also had a rich sense of cultural heritage to it that may still not be apparent in many Novo-Andino restaurants in the city. Alejandro Argumedo explained just why that might be:
“Our intent has been to integrate all aspects of managing or sustaining a landscape and its food diversity through cultural means. This has been our basis not only for conserving potato diversity, but also for sustaining traditional livelihoods…We had the faith that if we stayed true to the notion of cultural integrity—with the symbol of the potato to unite us under one sombrero—we would achieve not just one objective, but many at the same time.”
The people of the Potato Park—including the potatoes themselves—have done just that. This success would have intrigued and delighted Nikolay Vavilov, his colleague Sergey Bukasov, and many of the other crop historians who visited Peru over the last century.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.
About Gary Paul Nabhan
Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally-celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called “the father of the local food movement” by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, Carleton College and Unity College. Gary is also an orchard-keeper, wild forager and Ecumenical Franciscan brother in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona near the Mexican border. He is author or editor of twenty-four books, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Croation, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. For his writing and collaborative conservation work, he has been honored with a MacArthur “genius” award, a Southwest Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Vavilov Medal, and lifetime achievement awards from the Quivira Coalition and Society for Ethnobiology. He works as most of the year as a research scientist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and the rest as co-founder-facilitator of several food and farming alliances, including Renewing America’s Food Traditions and Flavors Without Borders.
Gary Nabhan: Crop Repatriation
Repatriation literally means to bring something back to the fatherland, taking into custody something which once belonged to your cultural community.
There have been other instances of crop repatriation-notably the dozens of Hopi crop varieties relocated, documented and returned to the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in 2002. This was facilitated by members of what is now called the Renewing America’s Food Traditions collaborative, including the Seed Savers Exchange, Native Seeds/SEARCH and the Center for Sustainable Environments.
Picking up where I left in my last blog post, the repatriation of Peruvian potatoes for in situ conservation has been unprecedented both in scale and in its acceptance by one of internationally-funded crop conservation and improvement centers (collectively known as CGIAR). Key scientists at the International Potato Center (CIP) had become convinced that such a community-based conservation strategy was indeed worth supporting. Some two decades before, however, CGIAR administrators such as Trevor Williams formally dismissed in situ conservation strategies as impractical, costly and unproductive. Today, CIP’s more forward-thinking scientists provide technical assistance upon request to farmers in the Potato Park who wish to gain advice on the best ways to cultivate, fertilize and manage their many varieties of native tubers. At the same time, the leaders of the Parque de la Papa has requested that the UN Food and Agriculture’s International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources formally recognize their cultural landscape as a “gene bank” of equal importance and status of that of the International Potato Center.
Today, the Quechuan farmers in the Potato Park maintain some 1200 varieties of potatoes named in their own language, in addition to razas criollas (land races) of maize, oca, quinoa, fava beans and wheat. When you visit them, you are at first dazzled by the sheer splendor of colors woven into their caps, ponchos, pants or dresses; these are folks that understand beauty. But color is not merely ornamental; the many varieties of potatoes range from black and purple to brown and yellow; they are knobby, curvilinear, oblong, round, or shaped like a hen’s egg. Each has its own identity, its own flavor, its own texture; some even have their own “voice.”
Quechuan farmer Ricardo Paco Chipa of the village of Paru Paru explained to me how one potato variety was found to have its own voice. It is now known as a “guardian potato” who collaborates with human guardians or stewards of potato diversity to protect this diversity from outside threats.
“The guardian potato is known as Santo Ruma. It began to speak one time when a thief came to rob all the potatoes from a field; it scared away the thief, and woke up the people to defend the field. Of course, it is rare for a potato to speak, “Ricardo added soberly, “but by doing so, it saved the others. Those of us who are appointed as human guardians of the potatoes must recognize this.”
I was intrigued by the notion that at least some of the potato varieties were perceived by the Quechuans as embodying qualities that the rest of us might attribute only to humans. Ricardo was straight forward in his
defense of this notion:
“Potatoes are part of our family. We keep them in our homes with us.”
An elder several decades older than Ricardo added that one should never cut a potato with a knife, because it is alive. Such empathy with the sentience of potatoes is complemented by detailed technical knowledge about the plants themselves, and the environments in which they grow. One of the Quechuan farmers of the
Potato Park wanted to affirm to academically-trained biologists of the veracity of his community’s knowledge:
“We want the world to know that we ourselves are scientists of the potato. We have detailed knowledge about the life of these plants. We read their flowers, their leaves, their vines. We read the soil, the weather; we see how the plants respond to the winds. They are our books.”
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
———-
Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.
About Gary Paul Nabhan
Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally-celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called “the father of the local food movement” by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, Carleton College and Unity College. Gary is also an orchard-keeper, wild forager and Ecumenical Franciscan brother in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona near the Mexican border. He is author or editor of twenty-four books, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Croation, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. For his writing and collaborative conservation work, he has been honored with a MacArthur “genius” award, a Southwest Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Vavilov Medal, and lifetime achievement awards from the Quivira Coalition and Society for Ethnobiology. He works as most of the year as a research scientist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and the rest as co-founder-facilitator of several food and farming alliances, including Renewing America’s Food Traditions and Flavors Without Borders.
Gary Paul Nabhan: A Visit to Perus Potato Park
For a quarter century, the breed of ethnobotanists I’ve hung with have proposed through countless lectures and publications that crop diversity can best conserved in situ, in the cultural landscapes managed by the traditional farmers who have long been its stewards. Now, in the highlands of Peru, a dream has come true, one that would have made the late Russian crop conservationist Nikolay Vavilov giddy with delight. Vavilov himself visited the Andes some seventy years ago, during an era when there was no “formal” in situ conservation for potatoes anywhere in the world. But today, there is such a place, simply known as the Parque de la Papa-the Potato Park. I had the pleasure to visit the park and to listen to the Quechuan farmers within it just after their “winter” solstice of 2008.
To arrive at the Parque de la Papa, you leave Cusco’s high elevation urbanity at 11,000 foot, and you climb, climb, climb. It seems as though you might leave the altiplano (highlands) behind altogether, for you wind up dirt roads toward the Andes’ snow-capped peaks until you can see above you only azure skies as deeply blue as a mountain lake. You must leave behind your earlier elevation sickness known as seroche by drinking the tea and chewing the leaves of a trickster of a plant known as coca, and by going slow. Indeed it is important to set your pace through the highlands slow enough for your mind to reconnect with farming traditions that have remained resilient for millennia; there are families here growing potatoes on stone-lined terraces with much of the skills and insights that their ancestors accumulated over dozens of generations.
When you are done meandering up switchbacks on a wheezing, teetering bus, you come to where Quechuans are harvesting their potatoes. There, you find yourself in front of a large billboard that proclaims that you have entered the Parque de la Papa. What it does not mention is that this is the only “park” in the world fully dedicated to the in situ conservation of native crops. The six Quechuan communities there have dedicated their future to the “repatriation, restoration and sustainable management of the native agro-biodiversity of the potato, and to the traditional knowledge shared within the communities associated with it.”
The six agrarian communities which have rallied around their shared interest in potato diversity are known as Chawaytiré, Sacaca, Kuyo Grande, Pampallaqta, Paru Paru, and Amaru. They did not always feel united with one another; in fact, in the years prior to the Potato Park, there had been some bloodshed between two of the communities over a contested boundary between their farming and grazing lands. Instead of staying entrenched in such territorial disputes, they agreed to be part of a grassroots initiative facilitated by ethnobotanist Alejandro Argumedo, one of the founders and leader of Asociación Andes based in Cusco. These agrarian communities agreed that they had more to gain by banding together in defense of their sustenance-potato culture—than they could ever realize by struggling against one another or working in isolation.
And so, they began to form institutional linkages not only with NGO’s such as Asociación Andes, but with networks including other indigenous communities struggling to define and maintain their own food sovereignty as well. In 2002, the six communities were confident enough to declare some 10,000 hectares of their lands the Parque de la Papa, which was soon followed by an agreement with the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru that allowed the repatriation of some 420 varieties of potatoes previously collected by CIP for the purposes of plant breeding.
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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.
About Gary Paul Nabhan
Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally-celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called “the father of the local food movement” by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, Carleton College and Unity College. Gary is also an orchard-keeper, wild forager and Ecumenical Franciscan brother in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona near the Mexican border. He is author or editor of twenty-four books, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Croation, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. For his writing and collaborative conservation work, he has been honored with a MacArthur “genius” award, a Southwest Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Vavilov Medal, and lifetime achievement awards from the Quivira Coalition and Society for Ethnobiology. He works as most of the year as a research scientist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and the rest as co-founder-facilitator of several food and farming alliances, including Renewing America’s Food Traditions and Flavors Without Borders.
